The conventional schooling I did get, later, was very good. My family moved to Sydney, and I attended the opportunity class at Eastwood public school, and went on to Fort Street Boys’ High School for three years, before returning to the country. The chief advantage of these years was the quality of the teaching I received, I was not a conscientious student, and I’m sure my teachers at Fort Street were well pleased to see the back of me.

I am extremely grateful that I spent my final school years in the country. My little over a year at Armidale High School (where I enjoyed the privilege of playing in the same atrocious school dance band as the celebrated Peter Allen, who couldn’t sing in those days either) was probably the happiest period of my entire adolescence. After the constraints of Fort Street, it was like being on holiday. I learned to play sport, to love the countryside, found an outlet for my musical talents, but the chief attraction, 1 must confess, were the girls.

I spent a year at Orange High, before returning to Sydney for a protracted, on/off, six-year stint at Sydney University, where I kept entirely to myself, and took no part in social activities. Such luminaries as Bob Ellis, Les Murray, Bruce Beresford, Germaine Greer, Andrew MacLennan etc., were apparently my contemporaries, but I never met them. I married, at 20, my girlfriend from Orange, and we had a child before I had graduated.

I had started working as a professional musician while still at school, and continued to do so in Sydney Music was, and still is, I suppose, my first love artistically, but as my taste was for modern jazz, it’s perhaps as well that I no longer play. Technically, I lacked a great deal, but I don’t doubt that my taste in music is reflected in my approach to fiction.

At first, I studied Arts. I must have wanted to be a writer, because I chose to study Latin and Greek. I was only 16 though, and soon decamped to roam Australia, working at the usual variety of unskilled jobs. When I returned to university the following year, I was in a more sober mood, and began a science degree. Thereafter, I had my head down, though, once again, I abandoned my studies in 1963 and had to repeat a year (‘misadventure’). I started to read fiction in my honours year, while wandering the stacks of the Fisher library. I think I must have realised, even at this stage, I didn’t want to be a scientist, but I kept at it.

I went to Canberra to do my Ph.D. in Alan Sargeson’s bioinorganic chemistry unit, a world leader in its field. I was the only Australian, apart from Sargeson himself, in the unit. There were two Americans, two New Zealanders and a Dane, besides myself. With my wife and young daughters, I lived in the ghetto for married graduate students with children, out at Hughes. We were the youngest couple there, and virtually the only Australians. It was quite an education. The reason I went to Canberra was to gain access to this cheap accommodation. I’d never heard of Sargeson.

I found some good musicians in Canberra, though the jazz was mainstream at best. One of the best bands I ever played in was Greg Gibson’s Capital City Jazz Band. Towards the end of my stay in Canberra, I was playing six nights a week at the Chopsticks restaurant. I was also writing fiction; a long, rambling mess that eventually surfaced (much cut) as the middle novella in my first collection North South West. I should have burnt it.

That I finally emerged with a good Ph.D. is less a reflection on my own efforts in the lab, than on those of my colleague David Buckingham, a New Zealander, then in his early thirties, who was discovering, at the time, an important series of chemical reactions. I did some of the work and my name went on the papers. It was a pretty hot little unit, and I was the least member of it.

After completing my Ph.D., not without the mandatory hiatus – both my wife and I got out of our depth in the sort of things that went on in Carroll Street – I went to the US on a prestigious fellowship that should have gone to someone else. Surrounded, at the biophysics unit of the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia (Baruch Blomberg, on the floor below, won the Nobel Prize a few years later) by ambitious and motivated Jewish American scientists, I underwent the most miserable year of my entire life.

The game was up. The bluff was over.

But where to turn? I wrote fiction when I should have been studying. The title novella from North South West was in my briefcase when I fled home, my scientific career in ruin. A dark cloud descended on me.

Finally, in the gloom, a ray of hope. Bill O’Sullivan, a kindly scientist who’d also studied in Philadelphia, gave me a job, and amid the mounting rejection slips – I was a total literary outsider and didn’t know anyone – Geoffrey Dutton of Sun Books offered encouragement. I was 27 by this stage, and a thoroughly dissolute no-hoper.

Finally, my body stepped in to save me again. Recovering from a duodenal hemorrhage in hospital, I decided to call it quits as a scientist. It was only a formality: I was too proud to be a second-rater, and that’s all that was left of me. Though I had nothing published or indeed accepted, I burnt my scientific bridges behind me, resigned, and sat home and wrote The Pure Land. When the Whitlam Government got to power Macmillans published my first two books. By this stage, I was a postman I was divorced and remarried, and the two main trouble areas in my life were at last, resolved.

There was nothing wrong with my first wife, who remains my oldest friend. There was nothing wrong with science, and my years as a scientist were not wasted years.

In Philadelphia, I saw men (and women) pursuing intellectual ends with a ferocity that absolutely staggered me The dialectical tradition of the Talmud was unleashed in the coffee room; People were humiliated, punched, shot down in flames to roars of laughter. I was appalled at the time, but guess what I think now.

Al Mildvan, my boss, literally ran around the lab. The place was an intoxicant, and if I got sick when I should have gotten high, that was my fault. Those East Coast Jews were real creators. They knew how to work, and their work was all that mattered to them Ego just didn’t come into it.

I wish I could go on to say that I pursue fiction the way they pursued biology, but I can’t. How can I work like that in this hole? Australia is Sleepy Hollow of the Western World, and any old shit is good enough out here. But I do work harder, and at a higher level, because of my experiences as a scientist.

I don’t hold with that old woman’s talk that ambition is all wrong. Australians aren’t ambitious enough. Aggression has its place, too. And Australians are far too sensitive to pain.

Battle is the only means by which both science and art advance! In my recent fiction, I have tried to inject a little yang into the yin of Australian writing, which I find, for the most part, pathetically soft and feeble. I have done this, because I am seriously concerned that Australia may end up with a British flag and an Argentine economy.

Consider, when you consider my recent novels – Moonlite, Plumbum, Dog Rock, Christian Rosy Cross, Poles Apart – not all of them published yet the ‘pattern’ of the martial artist: a series of ritualised aggressive and defensive movements, performed with skill, speed, strength and assurance. That’s the effect I was aiming for. Biting satire is a savage literary form, and I must eventually abandon it and turn to something more lyrical. Not because there’s anything wrong with satire; it’s just I want to explore areas that he outside its ambit, and I am getting older.

Lots of people have helped me as a voter. A few names that come to mind are Geoffrey Blainey, Patrick White, Rosemary Creswell, Michael Wilding, Brian Johns, Brian Stonier, Eric Rolls, Loonie Kramer, Elizabeth Harrower, Stephen Murray-Smith. But if I had to choose one, it would be Geoffrey Dutton, he’s one of the last true men of letters in this country and he’ll be hard to replace.